"Two kinds of mind: daylight and nocturnal. They have neither the same method nor the same morality. In broad daylight, you watch yourself; in the dark, you speak out."

Cioran

"We take offence when the police of another order deprives us of our right to laugh, of the right to humor, one that is never directed against ourselves (self derision) or against the powerful (satire in particular) but always against those weaker than ourselves—the right to laugh at the expense of those we are out to stigmatize. A kind of merry and frenzied nanoracism that is utterly moronic, that takes pleasure in wallowing in ignorance and that claims a right to stupidity and to the violence that it institutes—herein lies the spirit of our times''.

Mbembe

Szepanski

Currently, Achille Mbembe can state that there have never been so many camps in history as there are today. In his book Politik der Feindschaft he writes: “One must say that the camp has become a structuring component of global life. It is no longer perceived as a scandal.”

Following Hannah Arendt and Günther Anders’ remarks on the camp, the sociologist Christian Dries then brought into play the hitherto little-noticed term “world as extermination camp”, a world that is successively approaching a state that can be described – in demarcation from the system of Nazi concentration camps as the world state of camps – as largely unplanned. The border between inside and outside, which is still constitutive for the Nazi camp, implodes, so that the camp has no environment and the world becomes “an unimaginable” “abort”, a “cloaca of man”, a “throw-away world”.
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Today in Europe, but also elsewhere, this abbey is flooded with fuels that originate from paranoia and condense into a mass phenomenon called “nanorassism”, a paradoxical form in which frenzy and anaesthesia enter into an ominous union before finally discharging into spasms. With the term spasm, which Guattari used in his last writing Chaosmose, he wanted to point to the excessive and compulsive acceleration of the rhythms of the economic and the social, to a forced vibration of all rhythms in the everyday spaces of social communication that do not leave the subject unharmed. In the catastrophic, at times apocalyptic visions of Baudrillard, Kroker or Bifo Berardi that follow Guattari, one may recognize a way of rethinking the current processes of subjectivation: the turning away from an energetic-affirmative subjectivation that had still inspired the revolutionary theories of the twentieth century, and the turning to a theory of implosion that refers to subjectivation processes that lead to depression and exhaustion. In such times of paralyzing slackening, nanorassism is then, according to Mbembe, perhaps the best narcotic to which, it must be added, doses of a raging and stimulating adrenalin must be repeatedly mixed if the individual and collective bodies are not to fall completely into stupor.

For the narcotic prejudice, which not only ties itself to the colour of the skin, as Mbembe says, but also wants to eradicate or store the disturbing, must sometimes also be mobilized, flow into the strictly ordered channels of the streets and the social media in order to circulate there and give free rein to the intended malice. “Let them stay at home, they say. And if they absolutely want to live with us, among us, then only with their butts bare and their trousers down. The age of nanorassism is in reality that of a dirty racism, dirty and similar to the spectacle of pigs wallowing in the mud.” (Mbembe)

Gilles Châtelet has written a book entitled To Live and Think Like Pigs: The Incitement of Envy and Boredom in Market Democracies. First of all, forgive the animals. And what maxim does Châtelet refer to in his book that demands another life instead of a swinish life? The answer is relatively simple: Always unfold a space that gives justice to all and reinforces your own inclinations. Taking up an inclination, or as Tiqqun say, a forme-de-vie, does not only concern it and the knowledge of it, but it concerns thinking, its differentiation and its enhancement. Whoever understands nothing of this maxim lives like a pig. The neoliberal pig wants, if possible, to arrange everything in such a way that a surplus jumps out; it wants to have everything labelled exactly, priced and consumable and, finally, all its desires, strategies and projects are geared towards increasing the productivity and profitability of its own life. (which is still misjudged as freedom, because it is capital as a system that sets the compulsion to maximize profit via competition). For Châtelet, living differently means discovering unknown dimensions of existence or to discover...to define the vertigo (of the system).
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We are far from that, if nanorassism in its imperial spaces wants not only to preserve the dull existing that flows there, without any sensation, goal and conciseness, in its oases of well-being, but it wants those whom it has humiliated, trapped and exploited for centuries and who are now on their way to the oases of well-being. If that is not possible, at least expose them to unbearable living and camp conditions, store them every day, repeatedly impose racist blows and controls on them and leave them in a state of lawlessness. Nanorassism is a banality of a special kind, which suits the stupid machines, the automation of the mind and even the remains of the educated citizen like gears that mesh.

Digital automation short-circuits the balancing functions of the mind with systemic stupidity, and today this affects every actor without exception, from the consumer to the speculator. The systemic stupor has been enforced since 1993 with a series of technological shocks resulting in hegemonic corporations on the internet, Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple. The decline of the “spiritual value” reaches a peak point: it affects all thinking and feeling, yes, it affects thinking as such, its consistency, and thus also all sciences, their models and methods. Weber, Horkheimer and Adorno have described these processes as rationalization, which clearly lead to nihilism, which is also constantly concerned with cultivating its racisms...

For Mbembe, nanorassism is the inevitable complement of a state-based racism, which he calls “hydraulic racism,” the racism of the institutionalized micro- and macrodispositives of the state apparatuses and the media. A racism that “produces clandestines and illegals by all means, that dumps scum on the edges of cities like a heap of useless objects…”. (Mbembe). All appeals to humanism, universalism and justice – euphemisms of a special kind that, as Baudrillard already knew, circulate like oil and capital – have something of consolation or even more of trivialization, and that is even found in the “appeal to a certain run-down feminism...

...the creditors, who have access to the financial markets and the assets and afford racism as that harmless luxury, that accesoire with which it is easy and derogatory to entertain and with which one escapes the rampant boredom or, alternatively, the rampant stress for minutes...This nanorassism is at times quite anti-authoritarian – frolicsome and jolly, drunk and amused...trumpeting and effervescent at times. Showing off his trumpet and his frenzy he sometimes demands the “right to stupidity and the violence on which it is based – that is the spirit of the times” (Mbembe).

Achim Szepanski

 'The calculus of life passes through the death of the Other.'

     Achille Mbembe

"All we have is our self, our little ego. We are subject to a radical loss of space and time, even of world, of being-with."

Han

Dwyer

Mbembe suggests we are exiting from democracy, as contemporary sovereignty results in a large segment of the population living "at the edge of life" (37), subjected to either separation or death. For Mbembe, colonialism and slavery are "democracies' bitter sediment" (20), as both are constitutive of liberal democracies. Mbembe's analysis highlights our contemporary societies' production of third places for brutal violence outside law, drawing parallels with both the colony and the plantation. Terror and counter-terror produce fears that justify permanent states of exception, creating conditions to continuously use death worlds outside law to protect our suspended rights and freedoms. These conditions produce strict surveillance that focuses on "maximum utility and enjoyment" (36) instead of discipline.

Chapter 2 addresses our society of enmity, tracing the origins of contemporary hate, separation, and extermination through the colonial context. The author notes that security is enforced to maintain freedom, although freedom is merely a myth to reinforce the need for security. According to Mbembe, liberal democracies rely on mythoreligious reasoning to justify the security state, normalizing separation through camps.  Both nanoracism and hydraulic racism contribute to the construction of the enemy, subjecting them to "daily racist injuries"

Mbembe explores the connections between our exit from democracy and neoliberal and global capitalism, the changing technologies of the border, and the loss of reason. He argues that technology dramatically transformed our borders, creating an omnipresent and mobile border that excludes large segments of the population. He claims the greatest threat to liberal democracy is the growing division between democracy and global capitalism. The state is controlled by economic elites whose actions solely focus on producing profits at all costs. For Mbembe, neoliberal capitalism has transformed politics into a war against the classes, separating and subjugating the poor, minorities, women, Muslims, and the disabled to continuous violence (115). Alongside these transformations, knowledge is destabilized and becomes more narrowly interpreted as "knowledge for the market" (109), as acceptable knowledge is produced through computational calculations. This transformation contributes to the loss of reason and democracy, as well as a return to animism. Mbembe argues a critique of technology and re-establishing reason are necessary to challenge the post-fact democratic order.

• Patrick Dwyer
• 
  

Baldwin

 “There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one's head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people's pain.”

James Baldwin

 

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”

Primo Levi

"Both “processor” and “procession” derive from the Latin verb procedere, which means “to step forward.” The procession is harnessed by narration, which lends it tension. Processions stage special passages of a narration scenically. Scenography marks them. Because of their narrativity, a particular temporality inhabits them. Therefore it is neither possible nor meaningful to accelerate their procedere. Narration is not addition at all. The procedere of the processor, on the other hand, lacks all narrativity. Its activity has no image, no scenes. In contrast to the procession, it tells [erzählt] nothing. It simply counts [zählt]. Numbers are naked. Process, which likewise derives from the Latin verb procedere, is poor in narrativity because of its functionality. This makes it different from narrative sequence, which requires choreography or scenography. The functionally determined process is simply the object of steering or management''. 

Han

Sapolsky

"In this article, I review the brain bases of anxiety and depression (although both words describe everyday transient states that can trouble all of us, throughout I am referring to the medical diagnoses of anxiety disorders and major depression, diseases that incapacitate their sufferers chronically)''. 

"In contrast to anxiety, which can feel like desperate hyperactivity, major depression is characterized by helplessness, despair, an exhausted sense of being too overwhelmed to do anything (psychomotor retardation) and a loss of feelings of pleasure. Accordingly, depression has a different biology and requires some different strategies for treatment. But it, too, can be related to stress, and there is ample evidence of this association. First of all, psychological stress entails feeling a loss of control and predictability—an accurate description of depression. Second, major stressful events seem to precede depressive episodes early in the course of the disease."

"Imagine a rat trained to press a lever to avoid a mild, occasional shock—a task readily mastered. The rat is placed into a cage with the lever, and the anticipatory sense of mastery might well activate the pleasurable dopaminergic projections to the frontal cortex. When the increase in glucocorticoid secretion is moderate and transient—as would likely be the case here—the hormone enhances dopamine release. Suppose that in this circumstance, however, the lever has been disconnected; pressing it no longer prevents shocks. Initially this alteration produces a wildly hypervigilant state in the rat as it seeks a new coping response to stop the shocks. The animal presses the lever repeatedly, frantically trying to regain control. This is the essence of anxiety and of the multiple, disorganized attempts at coping. Physiologically, this state is characterized by massive activation of the sympathetic nervous system by epinephrine and of the norepinephrine projection from the locus coeruleus, as well as moderately increased glucocorticoid secretion".

"In the 1950s and 1960s pioneers such as John Mason, Seymour Levine and Jay Weiss—then at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Stanford University and the Rockefeller University, respectively— began to identify key facets of psychological stress. They found that such stress is exacerbated if there is no outlet for frustration, no sense of control, no social support and no impression that something better will follow. Thus, a rat will be less likely to develop an ulcer in response to a series of electric shocks if it can gnaw on a bar of wood throughout, because it has an outlet for frustration. A baboon will secrete fewer stress hormones in response to frequent fighting if the aggression results in a rise, rather than a fall, in the dominance hierarchy; he has a perception that life is improving. A person will become less hypertensive when exposed to painfully loud noise if she believes she can press a button at any time to lower the volume; she has a sense of control. But suppose such buffers are not available and the stress is chronic. Repeated challenges may demand repeated bursts of vigilance. At some point, this vigilance may become overgeneralized, leading an individual to conclude that he must always be on guard—even in the absence of the stress. And thus the realm of anxiety is entered. Alternatively, the chronic stress may be insurmountable, giving rise to feelings of helplessness. Again this response may become overgeneralized: a person may begin to feel she is always at a loss, even in circumstances that she can actually master. Depression is upon her".  

Sapolsky

"Perennialism is almost too easy for the contemporary Western person and potentially dangerous because we don't live in that ancient cultural context when you could actually be a renunciate - when you could actually step outside of society to go inward and achieve some state of release from cycles of Samsara. I feel like we're called to do something different at this time which is to be more involved in the world and whatever the spiritual path means today it's not to retreat to the mountain top, it's to be down in the trenches''. 

Segall (paraphrased) 

 ''Thought is the seed of action; but action is as much its second form as thought is its first. It rises in thought, to the end that it may be uttered and acted''.

Emerson

"Potentiality is effectively that which both is and is not. For ‘potentiality’ to be, it must also contain the thought of that which it is not. Agamben takes very seriously two of Aristotle's propositions from the Metaphysics which state that: ‘“impotence” and “impotent” stand for the privation which is contrary to potency of this sort, so that every potency belongs to the same subject and refers to the same process as a corresponding impotence’ (Aristotle 

Citation2001, Book IX, 1046a 25–32, p. 821) and also, ‘everything that is capable of being may possibly not be actual. That which is capable of being may either be or not be, the same thing then, is capable of being and not‐being’ (Aristotle Citation2001, Book IX, 1050b, p. 830). The significance of this is that there must always reside, in the relation of potentiality and actuality, an impotentiality that elides the split between potentiality and actuality. Thus, actuality and potentiality reside beside themselves, eliding the split between potentiality and actuality. Thus, all actuality contains the potentiality not to be (adynamia). Agamben concludes that for Aristotle, there is thus ‘truly potentiality’ only where the potentiality to not be does not lag behind actuality, but passes fully into it as such. For Agamben, following Aristotle, a thing is said to be potential if, when the act of which it said to be potential is realized, there will be nothing impotential (Agamben Citation1999, p. 183). See Aristotle (Citation2001, Book IX, 1047a 24–26, p. 821). This valorization of impotentiality, which can be considered both actively and passively, signifies the central singularity which guides much of Agamben's thought. The core of messianism belongs and does not belong, it is and is not. It is a generic region of being not affiliated with the actualization of particular commonalities. The messianic core of existential life salves the metaphysical distinction between being and not being, human and non‐human, time and eternity, and activity and passivity".

Patrick O'Connor

Solomon

''For the moment, the panic was my only sensation. The Xanax would relieve the panic if I took enough of it, but enough of it was enough to make me collapse completely into a thick, confusing, dream-heavy sleep. The days were like this: I would wake up, knowing that I was experiencing extreme panic. What I wanted was only to take enough panic medication to allow me to go back to sleep, and then I wanted to sleep until I got well. When I would wake up a few hours later, I wanted to take more sleeping pills. Killing myself, like dressing myself, was much too elaborate an agenda to enter my mind; I did not spend hours imagining how I would do such a thing. All I wanted was for “it” to stop; I could not have managed even to be so specific as to say what “it” was. I could not manage to say much; words, with which I have always been intimate, seemed suddenly very elaborate, difficult metaphors the use of which entailed much more energy than I could possibly muster. “Melancholia ends up in loss of meaning...I become silent and I die,” Julia Kristeva once wrote. “Melancholy persons are foreigners in their mother tongue”.

 

"If one imagines a soul of iron that weathers with grief and rusts with mild depression, then major depression is the startling collapse of a whole structure". 

 

"I returned, not long ago, to a wood in which I had played as a child and saw an oak, a hundred years dignified, in whose shade I used to play with my brother. In twenty years, a huge vine had attached itself to this confident tree and had nearly smothered it. It was hard to say where the tree left off and the vine began. The vine had twisted itself so entirely around the scaffolding of tree branches that its leaves seemed from a distance to be the leaves of the tree; only up close could you see how few living oak branches were left, and how a few desperate little budding sticks of oak stuck like a row of thumbs up the massive trunk, their leaves continuing to photosynthesize in the ignorant way of mechanical biology.

Fresh from a major depression in which I had hardly been able to take on board the idea of other people’s problems, I empathized with that tree. My depression had grown on me as that vine had conquered the oak; it had been a sucking thing that had wrapped itself around me, ugly and more alive than I. It had had a life of its own that bit by bit asphyxiated all of my life out of me. At the worst stage of major depression, I had moods that I knew were not my moods: they belonged to the depression, as surely as the leaves on that tree’s high branches belonged to the vine. When I tried to think clearly about this, I felt that my mind was immured, that it couldn’t expand in any direction. I knew that the sun was rising and setting, but little of its light reached me. I felt myself sagging under what was much stronger than I; first I could not use my ankles, and then I could not control my knees, and then my waist began to break under the strain, and then my shoulders turned in, and in the end I was compacted and fetal, depleted by this thing that was crushing me...Its tendrils threatened to pulverize my mind and my courage and my stomach, and crack my bones and desiccate my body. It went on glutting itself on me when there seemed nothing left to feed it''.

"I lay very still and thought about speaking, trying to figure out how to do it. I moved my tongue but there were no sounds. I had forgotten how to talk. Then I began to cry, but there were no tears, only a heaving incoherence. I was on my back. I wanted to turn over, but I couldn’t remember how to do that either. I tried to think about it, but the task seemed colossal. I thought that perhaps I’d had a stroke".

"Being anxious at this extreme level is bizarre. You feel all the time that you want to do something, that there is some affect that is unavailable to you, that there’s a physical need of impossible urgency and discomfort for which there is no relief, as though you were constantly vomiting from your stomach but had no mouth. With the depression, your vision narrows and begins to close down; it is like trying to watch TV through terrible static, where you can sort of see the picture but not really; where you cannot ever see people’s faces, except almost if there is a close-up; where nothing has edges...Becoming depressed is like going blind, the darkness at first gradual, then encompassing; it is like going deaf, hearing less and less until a terrible silence is all around you, until you cannot make any sound of your own to penetrate the quiet".

 

"...only half of Americans who have had major depression have ever sought help of any kind—even from a clergyman or a counselor. About 95 percent of that 50 percent go to primary-care physicians, who often don’t know much about psychiatric complaints. An American adult with depression would have his illness recognized only about 40 percent of the time...Less than half of those whose illness is recognized will get appropriate treatment. More than half of those who do seek help—another 25 percent of the depressed population—receive no treatment. About half of those who do receive treatment—13 percent or so of the depressed population—receive unsuitable treatment, some 6 percent of the depressed population—receive inadequate dosage for an inadequate length of time. So that leaves about 6 percent of the total depressed population who are getting adequate treatment. But many of these ultimately go off their medications, usually because of side effects. “It’s between 1 and 2 percent who get really optimal treatment,” says John Greden, director of the Mental Health Research Institute at the University of Michigan.''

"The truly depressed...had always been largely invisible because their very disease causes them to sever human contacts and allegiances...Those who are not themselves afflicted with the complaint dislike seeing it because the sight fills them with insecurity and provokes anxiety". Society rejects those who are afflicted "...as it had always done insofar as it could".

 

 

"...most of the poor depressed fit several profiles for initial onset of depression. Their economic hardship is only the beginning of their problems. They are often in bad relationships with parents, children, boyfriends, girlfriends, husbands, or wives. They are not well educated. They do not have easy distractions from their sorrow or suffering, such as satisfying jobs or interesting travel. They do not have the fundamental expectation of good feelings. In our rage to medicalize depression, we have tended to suggest that “real” depression occurs without reference to external materiality. This is simply not true''

"Depression cuts across class boundaries, but depression treatments do not. This means that most people who are poor and depressed stay poor and depressed; in fact, the longer they stay poor and depressed, the more poor and depressed they become. Poverty is depressing and depression is impoverishing, leading as it does to dysfunction and isolation. Poverty’s humility is a passive relationship to fate, a condition that in people of greater ostensible empowerment would require immediate treatment. The poor depressed perceive themselves to be supremely helpless, so helpless that they neither seek nor embrace support. The rest of the world dissociates from the poor depressed, and they dissociate themselves: they lose that most human quality of free will. When depression hits someone in the middle classes, it’s relatively easy to recognize. You’re going about your essentially okay life and suddenly you begin feeling bad all the time. You can’t function at a high level; you don’t have the will to get to work; you have no sense of control over your life; it seems to you that you will never accomplish anything and that experience itself is without meaning. As you become increasingly withdrawn, as you approach catatonia, you begin to attract the notice of friends and coworkers and family, who cannot understand why you are giving up on so much of what has always given you pleasure. Your depression is inconsistent with your private reality and inexplicable in your public reality.

If you’re way down at the bottom of the social ladder, however, the signs may be less immediately visible. For the miserable and oppressed poor, life has always been lousy and they’ve never felt great about it; they’ve never been able to get or hold a decent job; they’ve never expected to accomplish anything much; and they’ve certainly never entertained the idea that they have control over what happens to them. The normal condition of such people has a great deal in common with depression, and so there’s an attribution problem with their symptoms. What is symptomatic? What is rational and not symptomatic? There is a vast difference between simply having a difficult life and having a mood disorder, and though it is common to assume that depression is the natural result of such a life, the reality is frequently just the other way around. Afflicted by disabling depression, you fail to make anything of your life and remain stranded at the lowest echelon, overwhelmed by the very thought of helping yourself.''

 

"We have gone from a monolithic and malign mental health system for the depressed to a shattered, limited one...For Stanley, deinstitutionalization was the unfortunate result of civil libertarians’ defending the “wrong” people while the government went wild about cutting costs. Deinstitutionalization was supposed to translate into a diverse range of care in the community, but nothing of the sort has occurred. The consequence of deinstitutionalization has been the disappearance of a multitiered system of treatment in which people are gently shoehorned back into their communities: far too often, patients are in for total incarceration or they’re out on their own".

 

''I am persuaded that some of the broadest figures for depression are based in reality. Though it is a mistake to confuse numbers with truth, these figures tell an alarming story. According to recent research, about 3 percent of Americans—some 19 million—suffer from chronic depression. More than 2 million of those are children. Manic-depressive illness, often called bipolar illness because the mood of its victims varies from mania to depression, afflicts about 2.3 million and is the second-leading killer of young women, the third of young men. Depression as described in DSM-IV is the leading cause of disability in the United States and abroad for persons over the age of five. Worldwide, including the developing world, depression accounts for more of the disease burden, as calculated by premature death plus healthy life-years lost to disability, than anything else but heart disease. Depression claims more years than war, cancer, and AIDS put together. Other illnesses, from alcoholism to heart disease, mask depression when it causes them; if one takes that into consideration, depression may be the biggest killer on earth''.

 

 "At some point, a point we have not quite reached but will, I think, reach soon, the level of damage will begin to be more terrible than the advances we buy with that damage''.

 

"We need to be terrified by the statistics. What is to be done?...Few of us want to, or can, give up modernity of thought any more than we want to give up modernity of material existence. But we must start doing small things now to lower the level of socio-emotional pollution. We must look for faith (in anything: God or the self or other people or politics or beauty or just about anything else) and structure''.

"I believe that words are strong, that they can overwhelm what we fear when fear seems more awful than life is good. I have turned, with an increasingly fine attention, to love...by themselves pills are a weak poison, love a blunt knife, insight a rope that snaps under too much strain. With the lot of them, if you are lucky, you can save the tree from the vine''.

"We must not only avail ourselves of the immediate solutions to our current problems, but also seek to contain those problems and to avoid their purloining all our minds. The climbing rates of depression are without question the consequence of modernity. The pace of life, the technological chaos of it, the alienation of people from one another, the breakdown of traditional family structures, the loneliness that is endemic, the failure of systems of belief (religious, moral, political, social—anything that seemed once to give meaning and direction to life) have been catastrophic''.

 

The Unabomber—whose techniques of communicating his Luddite sensibilities were disastrous but whose insights into the perils of technology are sound—wrote in his manifesto, “Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy, then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction? It is already happening...In effect, antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual’s internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable.”

 

"It would be better for the environment if everyone stopped using cars, but that’s not going to happen unless there’s a tidal wave of utter crisis. Frankly, I think there will be men living on the moon before there will be a society free of automotive transport...There will be no revolution, but there will be the advent, perhaps, of different kinds of schools, different models of family and community, different processes of information. If we are to continue on earth, we will have to do so. We will balance treating illness with changing the circumstances that cause it...we will, I hope, save this earth’s rain forests, the ozone layer, the rivers and streams, the oceans; and we will also save, I hope, the minds and hearts of the people who live here''.

Andrew Solomon

"As an autist Jew, I don't think you over react when you talk about the social murder of disabled people. I would say that maybe there's in fact a genocide or something similar of disabled people''.

 

"When will we recognize the conditions being imposed here in the states as well as elsewhere throughout the world are a slow sadistic genocide and little more''.

 

"I am Swedish, and the problems caused by my disability are NOTHING compared to the stress, pain and anxiety of trying to navigate our systems of social security. The second most painful thing is that Swedes in general don't believe me when I talk about how people like me are (mis-)treated by the gatekeepers of our safety nets. They think it must be bad luck, or else I am faking my disability, when in fact the system is working as designed, rather than as intended''.

"The people who really suffer in the system are those with mental health conditions, especially if that overlaps with addiction, for example. It's easier for assessors to undermine that kind of disability because it's often partly true that these claimants might be undermining themselves...Other disabled people often look down on them because their conditions are seen as self-inflicted, or the result of moral failure. There's nothing class-conscious about a spinal injury. I think that's a factor in my being able to tackle the system from the standpoint of someone who is perceived as "deserving".

"They are trained to fuck up, to shift blame to the next department, and the next, and the next."

"Having similar problems with the psychiatric system in Denmark. Completely useless and honestly extremely harmful when they do try to “help”.

"I'm worried about disinformation and plain lack of knowledge...It scares me that you don't have to be a horrible bigot to make the world harder for vulnerable people".

"The main issue isn't funding, it's almost entirely to do with the way the system is run, it leads to prejudice and bigotry and it needs to change".

"I now am going to do everything I can to help my friend from afar, until she gets the treatment she needs and far after that. She will not become another one of the thousands who were taken too soon from this world because of the negligence of others".

 

"Some thoughts from Greece: You cannot make a system this horrific without every cog wanting to make it as hard as possible and wanting to kill as many trans people as possible."

"I see so many parallels to other failing institutions from climate change, the drug war, inequity, homelessness, urban design and the list goes on and on. So many institutions causing the harm they are intended to fix".

 

"This just hits me so incredibly hard. Especially about the hopeless feeling of not wanting to be bitter, angry and seeing the bad in humanity but then also only getting information and experiences that tell you "everything is fucked, everything is on fire!" Like, it is easy to blame and get angry...but that won't do anything. You just feel powerless".

"I don't know how much longer I can hold in all the grief I feel for every fucking person in this comment section. Can we riot? Right now? Can we go outside and just fucking release that shit onto the buildings that uphold our murder? I need it to be in my lifetime. I'm only keeping hope so I can wreck shit. We are not going to be killed like bugs".

 

"Here in the US we also have laws preventing landlords from discriminating based on race or gender. But they are tested very seldom. So exceedingly seldom, in fact, that one can go one's entire lifetime blatantly discriminating with no fear of getting caught. Complaints to the appropriate agencies typically go without a response. It's not that the system is racist, or that the administrators are racists. It that they will receive 20,000 complaints per month and they only have one field agent to respond. And this is the case in every city, every state, all over the country. Private citizens have taken matter in their own hands, and have often proven more effective at exposing discrimination than the govt. agencies whose sole job is to expose and punish discrimination. Here, like there, we have all these wonderful laws and rules to live by. Rules that make our society sound positively utopian on paper. The problem is enforcement. Enforcement is often lacking, often spotty, unequal, and sometimes downright malicious. 

I know: "don't attribute to malice that which could be explained by ignorance'' but I think every single person and step in this system is fuelled by malice alone. I don't think that you or anyone else can change anything by appealing to system administration, the only way I think you can save your sanity is by letting the whole situation radicalize you...I mean the "system" really doesn't care...It is not meant to care, it is meant to produce money or to save as much money as possible. That's because the bigger system doesn't care, capitalism doesn't care for human wellbeing, it exist to produce wealth for the rich but it doesn't stop there, it dictates how every part of human life must be lived because it controls how everything is being produced, who can own what, what types of relationships you can make. Economic systems aren't a shadow that casts upon humans, they are the mold that shapes human consciousness. I personally find this idea helpful because after you have been radicalized you start to take actions that you know they will truly make things better".

 

"I find it really annoying that people in our societies will act like...people are just being dramatic about things, when the reality is that these services try extremely hard to keep people from using them. They only exist so people can say it does, dismissing peoples' arguments".

''As someone with a disability who has had to fight for their own rights, which were so casually denied despite it being specifically and explicitly illegal, I identified strongly with your story. Accepting compromise, accepting that you got the outcome you wanted, and being happy about it doesn't mean that you have forgotten those who weren't so fortunate or that you're leaving them behind. You're all fighting for the same thing and the fight is what's important--fighting so that we can ALL succeed. That there is a fight at all, for either of us, is not ok. We do what we can to campaign for others to be treated the same. It's the system that's at fault, not you. I also highlighted sections of relevant law and waited forever and suffered for it, and had people treat me in unacceptable ways. It's beyond frustrating to have your rights written clearly yet no one cares that what's happening violates your rights. It took me years to accept that it happened because it shouldn't, it shouldn't be possible''

 

"I’ve seen herd mentality in young children. My son is disabled and all he ever wanted was to feel included and belong. He doesn’t have a mean bone in his body. I watched as these so called “nice” kids all ganged up on him. Individually they can be okay but in a group with one bully they all turn. Bullies are very sophisticated by the age of three. It’s fascinating and terrifying at the same time. I watched a 3 year old bully another 3 year old. She had two other kids working for her and would direct them on what to do and then pretend she had nothing to do with it".

Baldwin

 “I’m terrified at the moral apathy, the death of the heart, which is happening in my country. These people have deluded themselves for so long that they really don’t think I’m human. I base this on their conduct, not on what they say. And this means that they have become moral monsters.”

James Baldwin

‘Objects stabilise human life insofar as they give it a continuity,’ Han writes. Living matter and its history bestow on the object a presence, which activates its entire surroundings. Objects – especially well-designed, historically charged objects, and which are not necessarily artworks – can develop almost magical properties. Undinge is about the loss of this...‘The digital order deobjectifies the world by rendering it information,’ he writes. ‘It’s not objects but information that rules the living world...The world is becoming progressively untouchable, foggy and ghostly.’

Brookings

 

1. Socially isolated individuals are more likely to be in poverty than those with larger circles of friends. In particular, those with two or more “close” friends are almost 20 percent less likely to be poor:

Why social networks matter

Social networks are only one mechanism for reducing poverty, and by no means the most direct. It is also inevitably difficult to tease out cause and effect. But the UK results are consistent with the culture of social isolation commonly associated with poverty and social immobility.

Robert Putnam’s new book Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis highlights class differences in social ties as one way in which “more affluent, educated families amplify their other assets in helping to assure that their kids have richer opportunities.” Putnam finds a gap in friendship networks between people of differing levels of education. Indeed, the isolation of the most disadvantaged adolescents is a major theme of his book. A number of factors may be associated with this gap, including increased neighborhood sorting by income in the U.S. that may be reducing the chances of more diverse social networks, including among children and young people. As he puts it: “Our kids are increasingly growing up with kids like them who have parents like us.” This represents, he warns, “an incipient class apartheid.”

Social networks reflect and reinforce gaps in other domains. As the UK researchers point out: “Social networks cannot be viewed in isolation; broader inequalities, including in education and employment, shape the networks that people have access to and also have a greater independent effect on levels of poverty.”

Opportunity is most threatened when inequality in one dimension strongly overlaps with inequality in others: when lack of income, poor health, low education, and family instability are tightly correlated at the individual or community level. There is another disadvantage to add to the list: isolation.

RichardvReeves (Brookings)